A 3am concept album, an accent trick, and enough euphoria to power a warehouse rave. Confidence Man are hitting peak chaos, and they’re inviting you along for the ride.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Jake Terrey.
Stylist: Oriana De Luca.
MUA: Peter Beard.
Hair: Maddison Volishin.

Capturing the chaos of Confidence Man may be an impossible task, but on their third album ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, they give it a good go. They’re a band so bonkers their last tour brought The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty out of retirement to go see it, with a live show so good it’s been the thing to write about on your Glastonbury postcard home twice, now pedalling an album that looks at a summer defined by partying and calls it a warm-up.

Taking the idea of the concept album, usually reserved for rock operas and rap recitals, submerging it in booze and dusting it with a miscellaneous white powder, ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is a dancefloor epic created mostly at that magic hour after a night of getting wasted. 

“That was actually our goal from the beginning,” says leader of the pack Janet Planet. “Usually, we set a goal, and we don’t usually follow it. We’ve done the whole New Order thing where we write lyrics with cards and stuff like that, but this has been one thing that we actually managed to pull off.”

“Surprise, surprise. The one thing was we just had to get wasted,” adds assistant pop star Sugar Bones. We’re chatting to the pair in London, their new base that they’ve just, five hours before our chat, touched back down in after two weeks of touring their old home and birthplace, Australia. In true Confidence Man fashion, they haven’t slept yet, and it’s 10am.

There’s method in the madness though, and this approach to album creation has come out on top after almost a decade of trying things the non-Con-Man way and finding it utterly tedious.

“We’ve done tons of writing that’s more like nine to five going to the studio Monday to Friday, really being serious about it,” says Sugar.

“It just feels like you’re banging your head on the wall doing that for us,” adds Janet. “I suppose we figured out the best way to tap into the fastest and most easy way to write was this.”

Sugar explains, “Over the years, we’ve been perfecting the system, and we realised that when we’re coming up with ideas, if you’re in a bit of a lucid state of mind, it really helps with the speed of ideas and the creativity, because you’re just totally out of your normal mind.”

The record is certainly a reflection of the band and their relentless way of living,